More parsing

Daniel Riaño danielrr at eresmas.net
Sat Apr 20 19:18:37 EDT 2002


Clayton S. B. wrote:

>
>I guess that from my eclectic functional point of view, the construction:
>article -> prep (additive, substantive, pronoun) does not really present one
>with any new problems in terms of parsing trees.

Lucky you, Clayton! Maybe it is a simpler problem than I thought, but 
I still see a theoretical problem here. It is not a problem of 
semantics (the semantics are clear), but an intriguing question for 
any coherent, robust theory of syntactic description. There are many 
traditional ways to parse the text, of course, and most of them just 
beg the question. But if you want to parse the immediate constituents 
of the syntagm, you face a few problems with this kind of 
construction.

Here are a few alternative trees for the first syntagm (we don't 
really need any more text to parse it), and all of them present some 
problems. And there are more possible analysis. Have a look at it. I 
think you'll visualise it a lot better if you change your display 
font to a monospaced (= fixed-width) font, like Monaco or Courier 
(Eudora users, click the "I<-->|" button at the top menubar of this 
message).

Please note 1: In the following trees, I just give the immediate 
constituents' lexical content, not the syntactic tag or the 
syntagmatic classification, to simplify things
Please note 2: The main constituent (the nucleus of the syntagms) is 
always on the left of the branch.
Please note 3: I know Chomskians would put the preposition at the 
left side of the branch: for the sake of the argument we could pass 
upon this question, because it is not relevant for this particular 
point.
Final note: Sometimes I'll use just the few letters of every word for 
the sake of brevity. T1 is the first T=, ktl.


(A)   TO\ E)PI/BLHMA TO\ A)PO\ TOU= KAINOU=

                  /\
                 /  \
                /    \
               /      \
              /        \
             /          \
            /            \
           /              \
          /                \
    TO EPIBLHMA       TO APO TOU KAINOU
        /\                  /\
       /  \                /  \
      /    \              /    \
     /      \            /      \
    E      T1          TO-2    A. TOU K.
                                 /\
                                /  \
                               /    \
                              /      \
                          TOU K.     APO
                            \
                           / \
                          /   \
                         /     \
                     KAINOU   TOU



(B)   TO\ E)PI/BLHMA TO\ A)PO\ TOU= KAINOU=

                  /\
                 /  \
                /    \
               /      \
              /        \
             /          \
            /            \
           /              \
          /                \
    TO EPIBLHMA       TO APO TOU KAINOU
        /\                  /\
       /  \                /  \
      /    \              /    \
     /      \            /      \
  EPIBLHMA  TO      A. TOU K.   TO -2
                       /\
                      /  \
                     /    \
                    /      \
                TOU K.     APO
                  \
                 / \
                /   \
               /     \
           KAINOU   TOU



(C)   TO\ E)PI/BLHMA TO\ A)PO\ TOU= KAINOU=

                  /\
                 /  \
                /    \
               /      \
              /        \
             /          \
            /            \
           /              \
          /                \
    TO EPIBLHMA          APO TOU KAINOU
        /\                    /\
       /  \                  /  \
      /    \                /    \
     /      \              /      \
EPIBLHMA TO-1(TO-2)   TOU K.     APO
                        /\
                       /  \
                      /    \
                     /      \
                  KAINOU   TOU


(D)   TO\ E)PI/BLHMA TO\ A)PO\ TOU= KAINOU=

                    /\
                   /  \
                  /    \
                 /      \
                /        \
               /          \
              /            \
             /              \
            /                \
  EPIBLHMA APO TOU KAINOU   TO-1 (TO-2)
              /\
             /  \
            /    \              
           /      \
          /        \
         /          \
    EPIBLHMA   APO TOU KAINOU
                     /\
                    /  \
                   /    \
                  /      \
             TOU KAINOU  APO
                /\
               /  \
              /    \
	TOU   KAINOU


And many more... So what is the actual parsing used in the parsed 
editions of the NT, or the BGreekers proposals? And you, Clayton, 
what do you think now?


>  > Dear BGreekers,
>>
>>  I don't have any parsed text of the NT available, but I am curious to
>>  know how the authors parse the SN or SP that is placed formally in
>>  dependence of an article in attributive position (I would also like
>>  to know how do they parse the article and the resulting tree!), i.e.
>>  the SN or SP between the asterisks in:
>>
>  > TO\ E)PI/BLHMA TO\ *A)PO\ TOU= KAINOU=* Eu.Luc.5.36
>>  H( PI/STIS H( *DI' AU)TOU=* Act.Ap.3.16
>>  TH\N A)NA/STASIN TH\N *E)K NEKRW=N* Act.Ap.4.1-2
>>
>>  What I am interested in is not in the *tagging* of either the article
>>  or the dependent syntagmata, but the *parsing* of its constituents
>>  within the whole group. I imagine there is Chomskyan procedure to
>>  parse such sentences, and I'd like to know it too, but I am more
>>  interested in non-generative approaches. Does anybody know examples
>>  of not Indo-European languages with the same construction?
>
>Daniel,
>
>Nice question. Not the sort of thing one can just look up in BDF, Zerwick or
>any of the lesser grammars.
>
>...
>>From a functional perspective one could say that the constituent TO APO TOU
>KAINOU in  LUKE 5:36, limits TO EPIBLHMA. So I would parse it the same way
>you would an arthrous adjective or noun in the same slot. How to parse the
>elements of the prepositional phrase itself?  Why bother? It performs as a
>unit adjectivally, the parsing of the leaves of the tree does not seem to
>fulfil any useful purpose once the function of the unit is identified. Some
>hard core generative types might take issue with this statement. The
>constituent THN EK NEKRWN in ACTS 4:1-2, limits THN ANASTASIN. Same
>situation, same comments.
>
>The constituent hH DI' AUTOU in ACTS 3:16 limits hH PISTIS. Formally this
>looks like the other two examples, but there are some intriguing semantic
>ambiguities in here that are lacking in the other two examples.  Determining
>just exactly what DI' AUTOU means in this context isn't trivial. However,
>not sure this will impact the parsing problem any since I would assume that
>you are parsing syntax functions and not semantic ones. However, as anyone
>who has been through the generative school of thought knows, keeping the
>syntax functions and semantic ones separate is easy to say but difficult to
>implement.
-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Daniel Riaño Rufilanchas
Madrid, España




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